


Goes Down Easy

by primetime



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-31
Updated: 2011-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-15 06:42:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primetime/pseuds/primetime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So here’s the thing Dean hates about Sam’s new powers: sometimes he just feels a little bit useless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Goes Down Easy

So here’s the thing Dean hates about Sam’s new powers: sometimes he just feels a little bit useless.

“You’re not useless,” Sam sighs, exasperated.

Man, it must be so tough to be Sam, to have to put up with all of Dean’s perfectly reasonable issues all the time. Really, his life is hard. Dean punches his brother in the shoulder.

“Ow, Dean!” Sam says, and rubs at it.

“Oops,” Dean says. “Sorry, I forgot where all my arms and legs and shit go. It’s a little confusing, since I spend all my time just standing behind you looking pretty.”

“YOU’RE NOT USELESS!” Sam says. “Fine, fuck it, you’re right. You’re totally worthless.”

“Shut up,” Dean says, and scowls down at his fries. They’re soggy. Dean hates everything.

 

\---

 

“Get back!” Dean says, trying to reload with one hand and fire with the other. There are about six demons more than they’d expected, and Sam can only exorcise one at a time. It’s looking bad, actually, and you know, this isn’t actually the worst way to go out- no civilians around to get chomped, fighting side-by-side, gone in a blaze of-

“So,” Sam drags out the syllable. “Are we going or what?”

“What?” Dean says, and looks up from reloading. There are seven bodies slumped on the floor, demon-free. Actually, two of them are getting up and dusting themselves off, looking pretty unperturbed for people who’ve been carting around a big pile of black smoke for who knows how long.

“Fuck,” Dean says.

“Yeah, they were pretty lower-level,” Sam says, looking at his knuckles. He’s not gloating, but he’s close. Dean’s going to kill him, he really is, sorry Dad but this is getting ridiculous. Dean sounds whiny even in his own head.

“Can we have Mexican?” Sam says, looking hopeful.

Dean lets his shoulders slump. “Yeah, okay.”

 

\---

 

If life was fair, Sam’s new ass-kicking powers would mean a new, equal increase in awesome for Dean. Maybe they did, Dean thinks. Maybe he’s supposed to be the research guy, now. Dean could totally be the research guy. Bookish yet devilishly handsome, an equal-opportunity geek seducer.

The next case they get is in North Carolina, up near the Appalachians. Six people missing in two weeks: four men, two women; three over forty years old and three below; two divorced, one married, three single; four locals, two tourists; every color of the rainbow; there is no fucking connection here, Dean says out loud from where he’s face first in the keyboard.

Sam’s out picking up lunch from the new vintage diner up the street. Dean hates the fake-old type, that’s usually just a little too shiny and clean, where the food always sucks. Whatever, it’s close. Anyways, he had an amazing plan to solve the case in the half-hour head start he got before Sam came back, but he’s gotten absolutely nowhere.

Actually, he has gotten into Sam’s private email account, where he boggled at the number of emails from his California friends. Shouldn’t they have drifted apart by now? Seriously, Sam’s boring. Dean knows this very well. Sam’s boring, and probably even more boring by email. He sends out a mass email to everyone in Sam’s address book list thing (and it takes forever typing in all those names, there’s got to be an easier way to do this.)

Dear Friends of Sam Winchester,

Sam has voluntarily checked himself into a private rehab center for sex addiction. Not one of those fancy celebrity ones either, some little crappy one with nurses who look like the Hulk and a lot of creepy old guys drooling everywhere.

Please contact him at this email address with your good wishes. Sam needs your support, if he’s ever going to get his hand off his dick.

Sincerely,  
Dr. Jerry Smith

But with that done, Dean has to face up to the fact that he has no idea how Sam gets all the info on this thing. Dean’s pretty good at schmoozing his way past clerks and receptionists, but it’s hard to schmooze a computer, especially when you have to peck out every letter with two fingers.

And okay, even once he’s clicked on the Internet button and found Google and found the county website, he’s kind of stumped. There’s some stuff about local elections, garbage collection, that kind of small town shit, but nothing about profiles of the six victims for easy comparison for people trying to get some work done. He finds stuff about wakes for a bunch of old geezers but that’s as close as he gets to anything useful.

Dean picks at the holes in his jeans and sulks, a little. He could totally have been the research guy back in the eighties, before people came up with all this totally unnecessary crap. Porn comes on the TV. Laptops are pointless.

When Sam comes back in, he’s carrying two sandwiches, two bags of chips, and two coffees and he hardly has time to set it all down before he’s explaining, all triumphant, that he’d been talking to the guy behind the counter and he’d figured out the connection between all the victims. They were smokers, and more than that, they were smokers who (the guy could only speak for the locals, Sam interrupts himself) had been vaguely associated with serious fires.

Dean guesses that explains the six big piles of ash they’d found in that clearing, and kind of wishes he hadn’t gone sticking his fingers in. Ugh. He can barely overcome his nausea enough to lick off the salt from the chips. BBQ flavored. Nice.

 

\---

 

Whatever, so he’s not research guy, and he’s not badass, kick-ass-take-no-names guy anymore, so what. No big deal.

“Get out of bed, Dean,” Sam says. “I mean it. This is the last time.”

Dean just rolls over. Fuck Sam, fuck hunting, fuck all of it. Dean’s taking the day off.

“We still have to go get that fire spirit,” Sam says, poking him in the back of the neck with a pen Dean stole from the front desk. He’s been doing this for twenty minutes.

“No,” says Dean, into his extremely comfortable pillow. “You do it. Go freeze it in place with your mind-powers. I’ll buy you a beer when you get back.”

“C’mon, Dean, I’ll get all the glory. And the chicks! You hate that. Get up.”

“No,” Dean grunts, and pulls the bedspread up so that it covers the tender spot where Sam’s given him a pen-bruise.

"Fine," Sam snaps. "You're being a jerk. Also, I'm horny and you've been playing Victorian maiden for two days."

Dean kind of wishes that Sam had turned into the guy he'd pretended to be when Dean came to pick him up at Stanford- uptight and prissy and too pure and perfect to descend to the level of normal, horny human beings- because now that he's fessed up, he thinks it's totally cool to whine at Dean until Dean has to either jerk him off or kill him. Dean's feeling very sympathetic with Victorian maidens right now, actually, and if Sam thinks Dean is going anywhere near his dick today, he has another think coming.

Sam huffs off, probably to go whack it in the shower. Good riddance, Dean thinks, and pulls the pillow over his eyes. Sam's the awesome one now, anyway, he can take care of his balls himself.

 

\---

 

Dean's dozing in front of Dr. Phil when his phone starts vibrating. He narrows his eyes at it. Probably Sam, for more bitching. Dean's not in the mood. But it's Sam, so he fumbles it to his ear.

"What?"

"Dean!" Sam says, and he's panting, sounding breathless and scared, and Dean's halfway into his boots already.

"Sammy, where are you? I'm coming, Sam-" and Sam barely gets out the name of the patch of woods they drove by yesterday before the line goes dead.

Dean's hands are shaking on the steering wheel, and he barely remembers closing the door and hot-wiring the shitty pick-up in the spot in front of the room next door, but he tries to do an inventory as he drives. Fuck, fuck- he's got the Glock he keeps under his pillow and two knives in his boots and the shotgun he pulled out of his duffel as he ran out of the room. He left Sam alone, he left Sam alone with no one to look after him, and he's halfway to begging his dad for forgiveness already, wherever he is, fuck.

When he gets there, slamming his foot on the brake about five inches from a tree trunk and throwing the truck door open with a squeal, he can hear a young guy shrieking in the distance. Not Sam, thank- thank- just not Sam, but Dean books it in that direction anyway, ignoring the branches slapping against his face as he runs. What the fuck do you attack a fire spirit with anyway? Water gun? He's so fucked. He hasn't heard Sam yet, but then there's a shotgun firing-

He sees Sam, though, when he sprints into a clearing and steps right into a pile of what look like guts. Not human guts. Really, really disgusting green ones, blending in with the forest floor. His boots. Fuck, his boots.

"Sam?" he starts to yell, trying to ignore the way his feet are squelching. There's a kid tied to a tree with what looks like vines on the other side of theclearing, having a total panic attack, cigarettes scattered at his feet.

"Kid," he says, rushing over and starting to cut him loose. "You seen a big guy-"

"Dean!" Sam says from behind him, and oh fuck, thank god, thank god, Sammy. "It's okay, it's dead-" and he's barely got time to soak in the sight of Sam's stupid face when the kid busts out with, "What the fuck were you doing?"

"What?" says Dean, a little affronted. He didn't nick him or anything- he's not that sloppy with a knife.

"Why didn't you kill it?" the kid gasps out as he hyperventilates. "Twenty fucking minutes you just chase it around. You had a gun the whole time!"

Sam slouches and shrugs, looking as guilty as Dean's ever seen him, and the pit of worry in Dean's stomach turns immediately into suspicion. And fury. Yeah, that's fury building.

"Sam," Dean begins, slow and deliberate, catching the kid as he basically passes out. "You didn't maybe drag out one little easy kill so that you could pretend to have a big emergency-"

"Dean-" Sam interrupts, wincing.

"So that," Dean talks over him, "you could convince me that I'm not completely useless?"

"I'm-"

"Because you realized that the only thing that would make me feel any better is a heart attack over your fake death? And then fuck it up at the last minute by letting it get a shot at our boy here and therefore having to kill it yourself?"

"Shit," Sam says, and ducks when Dean aims right for his face.

"Let's get this kid back to his folks," Dean says, more than furious. "Give me my keys. You can take back the car I stole."

 

\---

 

Dean's anger doesn't last, though, not even halfway back to town, drowned out by relief as the adrenaline wears off. The kid wakes up after a couple minutes and gives him directions back to his house.

"Gonna quit smoking?" Dean asks, changing the radio.

"Yeah," says Julio. "Well, no."

"You should," Dean offers. "Fucks with your running speed, you know, in case you're ever trying to escape something nasty."

Julio laughs, a little desperate around the eyes. "Oh, Jesus Christ. What the fuck was that, anyway?"

Dean pauses, changing the channel again. "Boar," he concludes. "Boar with rabies."

The kid squints at him, then rolls his eyes. "Right. So, hey, what was that, your boyfriend?"

"He wishes," Dean mutters.

"Hah," says Julio. "Getting the couch for a couple days, eh?"

"More like the floor," Dean says. "No pillow, either."

There's a pause, where Julio pulls out his phone and starts texting somebody, fuck knows who. Hopefully not the cops.

"You know," Julio says, when they start getting closer to his street, "when my dad lost his job, he turned into a real jerk for a while."

"Did I ask for your biography, kid?" Dean says.

"A real jerk. He was so pissed that my mom was supporting the family with her job. She's an accountant. It used to make her cry, and he would just sit in the living room and sulk, like it was her fault."

"So?"

"So he manned up after a while and quit it. Your boyfriend was just trying to make you feel better, ass," Julio says, apparently losing patience with his metaphor or whatever.

"I thought you were pissed he almost got you killed," Dean says, snotty.

"I'm over it. Give him a break." Julio hops out as Dean pulls over. "Thanks for the ride, assface."

"You're really welcome," Dean says, staring him down. Dean hates teenagers, all of them, even Sam when he was an emo little bitch. Julio slams the car door a little too hard, not maliciously, just not giving a shit. He bangs on the top of the Impala like it's a cab to send it off. Dean pulls away, cursing Julio to a life of misery and STDs and shit.

He does feel a little bad about the look on Sam's face, though.

 

\---

 

“Okay, maybe I’ve been a little unreasonable,” Dean says, staring at the ceiling. He’s not a kid, he can admit when he’s wrong.

“A little,” Sam scoffs. ”A little my ass. You’ve been-“ Sam cuts himself off, pulling his shoulders up straight like he’s going to be the not-petty-at-all grown-up too. “Yeah, well, thanks, Dean.”

“You’re welcome,” Dean says, and then pushes Sam’s head down. “Now blow me, bitch.”

Sam ruins his attempt to re-manly this situation by cracking up. Sam ruins everything. One day, Dean is going to get him back for all the- oh god mouth on his dick.

Dean scratches lightly at his brother’s head and tries to stop from thrusting up. It works, sort of, okay not at all, but Sam just holds him down, warm forearm across his belly, and takes him in deeper. Dean will save his (sweet, sweet) revenge for another day.

 

\---

 

“You look troubled,” Dean says to his brother, a Yoda-like voice of wisdom in a world gone nuts.

“Yeah, I’ve been getting these weird emails,” Sam says, unplugging his laptop and packing it up in his bag.

“Hmm?” Dean says.

“Yeah, just- weird. I don’t know. I’m getting worried,” Sam says. “Maybe we should go to California.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Dean says, grinning and licking the ketchup off a fry. “I think I can help you out with that.”


End file.
